Digital Life. Tim Markham
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the expansion of the social media industries should be borne in mind, they do not fully determine the affordances of the practices that come to be endemic to one platform or another. Whatever these digital practices are, they are not dumb – that is, not the mute, pre-destined endpoints of structural determination. For Highmore it is the fundamental activity of distraction – turning away from one thing in order to turn towards another, or the latent energy of boredom and absent-mindedness – that clinches its potential to evolve into something more durable, namely an orientation towards the world and to others that is tenacious and principled. Distraction is above all an unresolved state, and that is what fuels subjective motion. I want to suggest that the way we feel our way through digital worlds is about more than a constant lack of resolution: it is also about provisionality. The idea is that a provisional state reveals what is at stake, and provisional practices of attending, responding, moving as well as subjectifying reveal positions taken in relation to those stakes. Provisionality is not about inconstancy of identity or ethics, but it does mean that these have to be thought of as exploratory, even experimental. It is common enough to talk of subjectification as a process rather than a destination, and similarly one’s response to the stake of a situation of thrownness is not all or nothing – positions must be taken but can also be revised or discarded as necessary. What sustains constancy over time are the repertoires developed individually and collectively for responding on the fly. The point of all this is straightforward enough: distraction is not passive but active; it is not naïve wonder but complicity; affect-driven motion is not about innocent pleasure-seeking but a matter of the unrelenting disclosure of the world and of one’s position in relation to it. The upshot is that our cultures of surfing and swiping are not displacement activities designed and embraced so that we do not have to think about the world as it really is and our responsibility for what happens in it. It is in the lightness and fluidity of these practices that the world, its stakes and our culpability are revealed – not when we stop to take a long hard look at the world and ourselves and decide once and for all what kind of stand to take, what kind of self to become.
It bears emphasizing that this is quite distinct from the cultures that have emerged on some social media platforms in which one is expected to have a ‘take’ on anything: knowing about something is insufficient to demonstrate cultural competence, and one must communicate an opinion for a post to pass muster. If being is conceived after Heidegger as thrownness into a world together with other people, that world is disclosed by way of otherness. Peters puts this succinctly when he writes that communication does not involve transmitting one’s intentionality; ‘rather, it entails bearing oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s otherness’ (1999: 17). The difference here is that surfing and swiping obviously do not require overt communication to take place; they are nonetheless position-takings or bearings that place one in a relation of otherness to whatever object, human or otherwise, is (barely) registered. Ganaele Langlois (2014) relates this specifically to the affective realm of social media, explaining that the embodied feltness of moving through these digital spaces is a process of relationality that can never be reduced to signification alone. Making sense is then a kind of flow through digital space that proceeds in relation to other flows, including the material, economic and political. This implies that the meaning of digital media is produced through movement, rather than discovered in situ, and meaning itself is thus as material and technological as it is symbolic or cultural. In an odd way it is the lack of clarity this provides that is most useful: there is no possibility of isolating any of these flows to assess its discrete impact, so that one could never infer meaning from platform architectures or economic imperatives. But it still means we can assert, pace Matt Fuller (2003), that the way we attribute meaningfulness to information depends at least in part on its formatting.
Langlois adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 64) notion of the abstract machine in order to think through how meaning-making has come to be colonized by software. As with Couldry and Hepp, this is less about the appropriation by technology of signification than its role in organizing the flow of signals. Kittler is with us once more, and it is difficult to argue against an approach that seeks to examine how the conditions of meaning production are shaped through assemblages of technology, culture and, crucially, institutions.15 This book, though, is especially interested in examining digital subjectification, and from a phenomenological perspective that means investigating the myriad ways we enact practices of selfhood. There is no such thing as a digital self, but there are all kinds of digital selfings. Such a perspective is ultimately at odds with the Deleuzean framework Langlois develops, in which it makes sense to speak of the production of an ideal capitalist self. It is one thing to assert that economic and technological imperatives will colour the subjectifying practices we find ready-to-hand as we traverse digital worlds – how could they not? – but it is another to claim that this culminates in a complete, integral capitalist subjectivity, as though one mode of being human has simply been displaced by another. The same might be said of the ‘mining of the psyche’ (Langlois 2014: 88) allegedly typical of datafied platforms, in that there is a distinction between critiquing the retrieval, ordering and exploiting of subjective experiences and averring that this amounts to taking something from a previously intact, innocent self.
The present volume is not interested in the ‘selling of brains’ (Lazzarato 2014, quoted in Langlois 2014: 90), not because it has no concern for privacy, but because it rejects the notion of internal states innate to a stable subject, over which that subject has or should have sovereignty. This is in line with Judith Butler’s (1997) problematization of an interiority and exteriority of subjectivity. Subjectification is not about the expression of an inner self for an outer world; it consists entirely in enacting practices of selfhood in the world, practices which are of that world and not ‘of’ the self. Digital Life takes questions of privacy, consent and autonomy seriously, but not at all from a perspective that sees selves as being stolen, rented or substituted by data. Consider one of the main objects of critique encountered in this corner of the literature: the coercive reshaping of how individuals externalize self-image on social media. It is certainly right to scrutinize the ways in which people manage their online identities, and we can do so in much the same way that Goffman did in the mid-twentieth century, using the dramaturgical model of performances, replete with costumes and scripts, but without questioning the good faith of the players observed. To start from the premise that to exist is to be open to otherness is not to suggest that we go through the world discovering how different or alike ‘we’ are from others. Instead it means adopting the subjectifying practices we find available to us as readily usable resources – practices of externalization and internalization – and revealing our relationality and responsibility to others. There are real choices with real implications associated with how we respond to the world so revealed, but it is not a question of fidelity to a true or authentic self; integrity can only derive from an ethics inherent in a present into which we are thrown and that is ontologically prior to any purported sense of origin.
Butler’s notion of performativity encapsulates adroitly the fact that in institutionally and politically determinate contexts identity performances are not playful but incited.16 The subsequent danger is that we internalize these subjectifications and make them our own – that is how conformity is enforced, and potentially reveals the danger of digital worlds furnishing us with atrophied capacities for self-making that we come to believe are us. The salient point, though, is that this is not a matter of your or my identity being corrupted or usurped. Being-in-the-world proceeds through endless iterations of externalization and internalization; this is how we become who we are, but it is not a process that ends with the discovery of what was there to begin with. Selfhood starts in the middle; we come to feel ourselves as ourselves as we hone our improvisatory repertoires, but those practices emerge from without, not within. What could amount to a nihilistic account of the impossibility of authenticity or the vacuity of selfhood, however, points to a different way forward. The point of all this is that if the ways we have of being selves are of the world and not of us, then they are collective, and we have a collective responsibility for what those subjectivities reveal of the world and with what consequences. To live increasingly digitally is not, then, to experience subjective loss but to make that world familiar, enacting provisional selves that will come to feel natural. This will have, and indeed already has, significant affordances and implications, the contingency of which may be revealed